Amanda Anderson
Caroline Donovan Professor of English Literature
Department of English
Johns Hopkins University
26 Gilman Hall
3400 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218
Phone: (410) 516-8033
Email: aanderson@jhu.edu
Amanda Anderson is Caroline Donovan Professor of English Literature and the Director of the School of Criticism and Theory, a six-week summer institute located at Cornell University. She specializes in critical theory and nineteenth-century British literature and culture. She received her Ph.D. in English from Cornell University and taught at the University of Illinois before moving to Hopkins in 1999. She served as chair of the department from 2003-2009.
Her work has focused on questions of modern self-understanding, disciplinary methodology, and the place of critique and argumentation across philosophy and literature (with a special emphasis on liberalism and proceduralism). She is particularly interested in the legacies of philosophical modernity, the normative bases of contemporary theories, and the relation between formal argument and informing ethos (style, character, method).
She is the author of The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton, 2006); The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton, 2001); and Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Cornell, 1993). She has also co-edited, with Joseph Valente, Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle (Princeton, 2002). Her current project, tentatively titled Bleak Liberalism, focuses on the relation between the liberal aesthetic and liberalism as a political philosophy, paying special attention to the dialectic of hope and skepticism animating many forms of liberal thought.
At Hopkins Anderson's recent graduate teaching has included courses on forms of argument in contemporary theory; Victorian internationalism; Nineteenth-century realism; literary theory; and ethics and aesthetics. At the undergraduate level she teaches literary theory and a variety of topics in nineteenth-century literature.
Style DIV, please skip.
Style DIV, please skip.